oh those wacky halliburtons

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any better (or is that worse?):

On today’s episode of “Those Wacky Halliburtons,” the AP reports [washingtonpost.com] in the Washington Post that a subsidiary of the company paid $2.4 million in bribes to a Nigerian tax official, in order to get favorable tax treatment.

The company may now owe as much as $5 million in back taxes to the Nigerian government. But I’m sure this will be no problem; they can just pull it from the lucrative contract they recently were given, in a non-competitive process, by the Army Corps of Engineers–not that there was anything improper about just handing over that contract to the vice president’s former company–to manage the Iraqi oil industry.